There Are No Good Guys Los Angeles in James Ellroy’s LA Quartet Bachelor Thesis Literatuurwetenschap By Jasper Gielkens June/July 2014 Introduction The LA Quartet of James Ellroy (1948) consists of four books. The first, The Black Dahlia (1987)1, can be considered a stand-alone novel, while the later three books, The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), and finally White Jazz (1992), function more or less as a trilogy, sharing one arch enemy: Dudley Smith. They are all set in Los Angeles: nicknamed the ‘City of Angels’ and ‘the Great Wrong Place’. It is my intention to first set the scene by describing some characteristics of typical Los Angeles literature, eventually focusing on Los Angeles crime fiction. By then examining some characteristics of James Ellroy’s Los Angeles in the four novels of the LA Quartet, and comparing these to two other crime novels set in Los Angeles, I hope to further define Ellroy’s L.A.. Finally, through a thorough investigation of the motives of the Quartet’s protagonists, I will argue that Los Angeles in Ellroy’s novels is a place with its own rules about justice. As the books’ collective moniker implies, they should say something about Los Angeles, in the very least about Ellroy’s Los Angeles. The question is: does Ellroy’s L.A. comply with the reigning ideas about Los Angeles literature, and where do the two differ? In my argument I will make extensive use of three studies of Los Angeles (literature): Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990), David Fine’s Imagining Los Angeles (2000), and William McClung’s Landscapes of Desire (2000). The arguments of these three scholars will help form my definition of Los Angeles literature, more specifically the crime fiction written about L.A.. For my crime fiction comparisons, I will use two other crime novels set in Los Angeles to investigate if and how Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet is representative of contemporary Los Angeles (crime) fiction. Michael Connelly’s police procedural The Black Echo (1991) and Robert Crais’s private eye novel L.A. Requiem (1999) were chosen for this purpose, the former because it is the first of a series with a detective named Hieronymus Bosch and Los Angeles is paralleled with the Dutch painter’s hellish visions, the latter because to my mind no writing on L.A. crime fiction can exist without the inclusion of a Los Angeles private eye. Any discussion of the ‘literature of a place’, as I aim to do for Los Angeles, implies that there is such a thing. Michael Kowalewski defines this so-called ‘regional writing’ as follows: “descriptions that create a three-dimensional sense of memory and life.” He adds: “the best American regional writing tends to be less about a place than of it, with a writer’s central nervous system immersed in the local ecology, subcultures, hidden history, and spoken idioms of a given 1 Whenever I quote from the four novels of the Quartet in this paper, I will use abbreviations. The Black Dahlia is TBD, The Big Nowhere, TBN, L.A. Confidential, LAC and finally White Jazz, WJ. Connelly’s and Crais’ novels will be abbreviated TBE and LAR, for The Black Echo and L.A. Requiem, respectively. location”. (Kowalewski 7) With a wink to the double meaning of ‘nervous system’ in the case of James Elllroy’s novels, it is from this argument I would like to build mine. Los Angeles Literature Both Mike Davis and David Fine root their literary histories of Los Angeles deeply in the ‘booster myth’, meaning that Los Angeles, at the start of the 20th century, was ‘sold’ to new developers by a group of people interested in its development and the possibilities of the region. The idea of Southern California as a perfect place to live was quite deliberately formed and made: ‘boosted’ in print: “Southern California as the promised land of a millenarian Anglo-Saxon racial odyssey” (Davis 20). Led by a “syndicate of developers, bankers and transport magnates [...] set out to sell Los Angeles – as no city had ever been sold – to the restless but affluent babbitry of the Middle West. […] For more than a quarter century, an unprecedented mass migration […] transferred their savings and small fortunes into Southern California real estate.” (Davis 25) David Fine expands on this idea, writing that a Southern California myth, rooted in a Spanish Catholic past that had never truly existed, was created by the boosters. “[That] history here is a fiction, a deliberate construct to serve real estate interests.” (Fine 29) I will be returning to the importance of real estate in James Ellroy’s literature later, but for now the idea of Los Angeles as a place that was marketed and sold has to be kept firmly in the back of the mind. The fact that one of the more important reasons for the influx of many new inhabitants in the city has its origins in fiction and myth-making seems to me an important element of the city’s (literary) history, mainly because it speaks to the expectations with which people entered the city. With the development of the movie industry in Los Angeles – Hollywood – years later, many more people would come to the city full of hopes and dreams, many of which would not come to fruition. The prime example of such failures in this paper will of course be the murder of Elizabeth Short, The Black Dahlia, who symbolizes many of the city’s characteristics. A direct result of the Booster-myth created about the Los Angeles basin is that there was a great influx of people from outside the city. David Fine writes that this is the starting point of any discussion of Los Angeles literature: the fact that all the writers, until the most recent decades, were outsiders. (Fine 15) In his article Los Angeles as a Literary Region (2003), Fine defines regional writing as “the product of writers born in, nurtured by, and strongly attached to the regions about which they write.” (Fine 397) For the sake of this thesis then, it is important to note that Los Angeles literature is classically the writing of outsiders, and yet, Ellroy is not one. Fine adds: “The distanced perspective of the outsider, marked by a sense of dislocation and estrangement, is the central and essential feature of the fiction of Los Angeles, distinguishing it from fiction about other American places.” (Fine 15-6) A consequence of the aforementioned ‘outsider status’ is that the newcomers to Los Angeles, as David Fine argues: “came into an expansive landscape that appeared to them to have no discernible center, no reigning architectural style, and no sense of regional past, [nothing] to convince them that they had, in fact, arrived in a place” (Fine 16) This results, according to Fine, in a fiction which is obsessed with themes of “unreality, masquerade and deception” (16), and with the home the writers had left in the back of their minds, Los Angeles offered “images of instability, fragility, unreality” (16). To this experience must be added the fact that many of the writers coming to Los Angeles during the first few decades came to the city to work in Hollywood, pre-eminently a place of masquerade and unreality, perhaps even deception. Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy and William Faulkner, to name just a few, were all under contract to the studio system at one point, sometimes even adapting each other’s work. Chandler, for example, co-wrote2 the screenplay for Double Indemnity (1944), adapting James M. Cain’s novel of the same name. As mentioned, part of the unreal nature of Los Angeles (literature) is its concern with architecture. William McClung argues “two contradictory visions of Los Angeles. […] An acquired Arcadia, a found natural paradise; and an invented Utopia, an empty space inviting development.” (McClung, xvi) This development of the city, by the same people that fostered the Booster-myth, is a large part of Los Angeles literature. Firstly, there is that lack of a uniform architectural style. The novels of the Quartet are full of examples: whenever a house is mentioned, the style in which it is built is almost invariably named, sometimes to arguably comical effect: “The address was a Spanish castle apartment house: white-washed cement shaped into ornamental turrets, balconies topped by sun-weathered awnings.” (TBD 204) In this one quote we have the imported European influence, the incongruous and unreal aggregation of a castle, apartment and house in one. To summarize, Los Angeles literature should, according to the literature about Los Angeles, be a place of distinct characteristics. The fact that Los Angeles itself was sold to newcomers by the Boosters and because of that has an inherent lack of authenticity to it is its starting point. The outsiders that started to write in and about the city, flooding the city in the years after, created a vision of their own, at the same time importing their outside experiences and shaping a new vision of Los Angeles set against the experience of the new city. The city’s heterogeneous 2 With Billy Wilder. architectural styles add to this idea of not really being in one place, as David Fine argues, alongside its unreal nature. Because James Ellroy is not from outside of Los Angeles, one would expect a difference between his writing and the ‘classic’ writing of writers not native to Los Angeles. This is one of the reasons that make Ellroy’s fiction so useful for this investigation. Moreover, Ellroy’s own history is very much connected to the city’s history.